History and the Testimony of Language

4. Historical Inference from Word Borrowing

4 Historical inference from Word borrowing A second essential angle of approach to deriving history from lexical evidence is through inference from the histories of word borrowing. Word borrowing is perhaps the single most important category of lexical evidence because from it we uncover the histories of societies in the time spans that lie between the nodal periods of the linguistic chronology. such evidence not only tracks the spread of ideas and things across the historical landscape, but, more important, enables us to identify the particular kinds of extended historical encounter that took place between societies, and to infer the demography and the demographic outcomes of such encounters. inTrodUCinG THE ToPiC Many kinds of linguistic change and all language shis derive in the last analysis from demographic relations.1 sociolinguistics has usually been content with recognizing patterns of social relations between different populations and identifying the kinds of language changes that accompany those relations. More basically it is the proportional concentrations of such populations within the social mix that determine the kind of influence each can have on the changes in language that take place. Language history does indeed reflect social history because language is the is chapter—with a number of refinements, revisions, and additions—builds on C. Ehret, “e demographic implications of Linguistic Change and Language shi,” in C. Fyfe and d. McMaster (eds.), African Historical Demography, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Centre for African studies, 1981), pp. 153–182. 82 vehicle of social existence. but social history is the outward expression of human accommodations to and manipulation of more fundamental pressures and forces, and so language changes are driven, even if sometimes only indirectly, by those same engines. en, too, historical investigations and sociolinguistic investigations start from opposite ends. e sociolinguist asks which language changes accompany which particular sociological situations. e historian comes at the problem from the other direction: if we have evidence of such and such an array of past changes in language, what can we infer about the human situation that engendered those changes? e motivations of historically significant language change can be grouped under two broad headings: practical utility and social utility (or prestige). Practical utility refers to the learning of a new or additional language to carry on the business of life; to the adoption (borrowing) or coinage of new words by a language to name concepts, things, or processes new to or newly developed by the population speaking the language; and to the simplification of grammar, for facilitating language learning, in the formation of pidgins and creoles.2 e practical utility of a change does not in every case reflect demographic relations. Social utility, or prestige motives, can be seen both in the adoption of words, expressions , and manners of pronunciation from prestigious groups and in most shis of a population from the using of one language to the using of another. e prestige of one language or dialect is usually justified on esthetic grounds by its speakers . e reality is that prestige always reflects power, whether regional and political or over access to desirable things. e speakers of a dialect or language that has a general prestige are numerically preponderant in positions of political and economic power. e speakers of a tongue with prestige limited to one area of culture are the numerically preponderant controllers of access to, or practitioners of, that aspect of culture. Changes for social utility thus always ultimately reflect demographic relations. Past demographic relations leave linguistic artifacts behind, in the shape of either 1. modifications in a language attributable to contacts with other languages (or other dialects of the same language); or 2. the replacement of one language by another (or of one dialect of a language by another) as the common new idiom. e first situation can arise without the second development’s taking place. e second probably almost never occurs without some effects, however slight, of the first process, in the form of elements taken over from the previous language into the tongue that displaces it. Words adopted from one language into another language (loanwords) form the Historical Inference from Word Borrowing 83 core of the historical evidence. sociolinguists, because they are, aer all, linguists and not lexicographers, are wont to emphasize the phonological and grammatical effects of contact. but it is in vocabulary that the effects of contact are first and, in the end, most strongly produced. Analysis...